Broadband tariff country scorecard – Q4 2013

Country tariff benchmarks for residential broadband services

We compare the average monthly tariffs for residential broadband services in 90 countries. The data includes standalone and bundled services offered over copper, cable and fibre in Q4 2013.

Many countries in Eastern Europe as well as some in Asia-Pacific rank well in terms of offering the cheapest broadband, whereas residents who live in the Middle East and Africa and South and East Asia tend to pay most for their broadband services.

Overall, the trend seems to be for some less developed countries – in particular those outside the EU – to have high broadband prices caused by lower investment in infrastructure as well as lower take-up which prevents them from benefiting from economies of scale. On the other hand, customers in some more developed Western European countries as well as countries like Singapore, the United States, Canada, New Zealand and Australia tend to pay more for broadband than those in Eastern European states which now belong to the European Union and often benefit from the EU funding.

Even though much has been said about the recent introduction of very high-speed services in Japan, it still remains one of the cheapest countries in the world for residential broadband services.

Russia and the rest of Europe dominate the low cost end of the broadband scale with only two of the ten cheapest from elsewhere (Kuwait and Uruguay).

It is still something of a surprise to see the US and Canada so lowly ranked when it comes to average cost (58th and 54th respectively). Russia is almost two and half times cheaper on average than the US, in PPP terms, for a broadband connection.

Figure 1: Average monthly price for residential broadband services by country in Q4 2013

Find out more

The full version of this report and access to the tariff databases (including cost per megabit by country rankings) is available to subscribers of Point Topic’s Broadband Operators & Tariffs service. To find out more, please telephone +44 (0)20 3301 3303 or e-mail toby.french@point-topic.com.